


Overlooked

by taylor_tut



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Gen, Richie Tozier is a Mess, Sick Character, Sick Richie Tozier, Sickfic, Soft Eddie Kaspbrak
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-16
Updated: 2019-10-16
Packaged: 2020-12-17 08:36:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21051467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taylor_tut/pseuds/taylor_tut
Summary: Another prompt from my tumblr! This one is for Richie with a stomach bug at and after the Chinese restaurant and the Losers being Soft(TM).





	Overlooked

**Author's Note:**

> feel free to request Richie sickfics/whump fics! I am loving writing them :) you can request them here or on my tumblr at @taylortut!

Richie was beginning to think that maybe he should have gone with his original assumption of coming down with a stomach bug after he’d thrown up after the phone call with Mike. He’d excused himself from the table casually with a bit of a churning stomach with the intention of just splashing a little water on his face and ended up barely making it to the toilet before throwing up his meal. Maybe it was the booze, but he drank like that all the time after shows and was nowhere near his limit, not to mention that now that the nausea had died down a bit, his stomach HURT rather than having that feeling of momentary relief he usually experienced after getting sick from too much alcohol. 

Leaning over the sink, he rinsed his mouth out and splashed some cold water in his face, but realized when he went to dry it that his hands were still shaking pretty badly. When he looked in the mirror, he could see that he looked pale and sweaty, not to mention that the room was starting to spin a little bit around him and he wasn’t totally sure that he’d make it all the way back to the table without needing to rush right back here for a repeat performance. Instead, he sat down with his back against a wall in the cleanest place he could find to sit, which, microbially speaking, probably wasn’t saying much, and pushed his hands against his eyes to wait out the vertigo and nausea. 

“Damn, did Richie fall in or something?” Eddie asked. “He’s been gone like 20 minutes.”

Bill frowned. “He has, hasn’t he?” 

“You don’t think he would have left, do you?” Mike asked. He hadn’t dropped the bomb of why he’d really called them here just yet, but perhaps he’d remembered something that would give it away and decided to go back home. 

“Nah, there’s no door that way,” Bev replied. 

“Someone should check on him,” Mike suggested, trying not to let urgency seep into his tone. He was scared—without their memories, they were more vulnerable to Pennywise’s attacks than even they would normally be, but he didn’t want to leave the rest of the group alone to potentially wander off or deal with an attack if one came. 

“He’s a big boy, Mike,” Eddie shrugged, taking another sip of his water. “I’m sure he’s fine.” The pleading look that Mike gave him must have been compelling, because Eddie looked irritated for a brief moment, then sighed irritably and stood up. “Fine, I’ll go drag his ass back out here, but you owe me.” 

Eddie threw open the bathroom door and Richie was, of course, the first thing he saw, his face on his knees and leaning against the wall. He couldn’t hide the disgust in his face. 

“Are you sitting on the bathroom floor?” he asked, and Richie stirred like he’d been nearly asleep, blinking for a moment. 

“The fuck does it look like, Eds?” he demanded. Eddie regretted volunteering for this already. 

“You planning on coming back any time soon?” 

Richie looked like he was considering his answer quite carefully before nodding. 

“Guess I probably should, huh,” he resigned, sticking out his hands helplessly. “Help me up?” 

Eddie groaned at the annoyance but strode across the bathroom to take his hands, anyway, and helped him into a standing position, where he wavered dangerously for a moment. 

“Jesus,” he muttered, “are you seriously this drunk?” 

Since Richie wasn’t quite sure how to answer that, he shrugged and pushed away from Eddie to head off in the direction of the table. 

“You’re welcome,” Eddie called after him, then muttered, “asshole,” under his breath. 

The first thing that Richie did when he got to the table was collapse back into his seat. He was suspiciously quiet through Mike’s explanation of why he’d really called them there and reasonably freaked out at the bugs and other nightmare-fodder that crawled around the table before they left. Though his car was still at the restaurant, he asked for a ride back to the hotel, and Ben was happy to oblige, only giving him a little bit of shit for drinking too much, which Richie accepted with surprising docility and a wan smile. 

Back at the hotel, Eddie found that he couldn’t sleep. That was predictable, he supposed, for someone who had just gone through what he’d gone through. If he had to guess, he would say that the others were probably awake, too, in their own rooms, fearing the same fears alone and not knowing it, just like they’d been doing for the past 27 years. 

Maybe a drink of water would help him sleep. Not wanting to go all the way downstairs for a cup, he decided instead to go to the bathroom and drink from the sink. 

It was already occupied, something he realized by pushing the closed-over door and flipping on the light to jump a foot in the air. Richie was sitting on the bathroom floor, not for the first time that night, one arm draped over the side of the toilet and his head resting on that. He was pale and sweaty and decidedly miserable. 

“Come back with a warrant,” Richie grumbled, and Eddie really wished that his concern wasn’t so much louder than his dread. 

“You okay?” he asked, and Richie smiled exaggeratedly. 

“Never better. Like I said, this is sort of occupado,” he added a strange accent to the sentence, “so if you wanna just use the one downstairs…”

“I was just going to get some water,” he admitted. “How long have you been in here?”

Richie shrugged. He wasn’t picking his head up to look at him or to speak, dripping exhaustion from every joint. 

“‘Time is it?”

“Almost three.” 

“Then almost three hours.”

“Jesus,” he empathized. “How many times have you… you know.” 

“Lost track,” he said. “Head hurts too much to count.”

“You’re probably dehydrated. I’ll be back.” Eddie closed the door over behind him, wincing at the sound of Richie dry heaving behind him as he went downstairs for a glass of water, filled it, and came back upstairs to hand it to Richie, who didn’t move. “Here,” he prompted, and Richie pried his eyes open again.

“Eddie, I’m not gonna keep that down—”

“You need to drink something,” Eddie curtailed. “You’re throwing up and,” he braved the fear to press his hand to Richie’s forehead, “you’ve got a low-grade fever.”

“I don’t—”

“God, you’re a pain in the ass,” Eddie snapped. He was still pissed from all the shit that Richie had been giving him all evening about his mother and his job and everything else, not to mention his skin was positively crawling with the germs he could practically feel infecting him just by being in the bathroom right now. However, he couldn’t just leave Richie alone like this. “Just take the water.” He winced and took it, taking a few tentative sips and then a much larger one when Eddie glared. “I'm going back to bed,” he announced.”If you can't keep that down…” He wished he could tell Richie to come wake him up if he got sick again from just water after several hours of vomiting, wished he would just promise to sit with him until he knew whether or not they should take him to the hospital for fluids and an anti-emetic. Instead, he said, “tell somebody,” and closed the door behind him. 

The next morning, everyone but Richie met downstairs for breakfast. They waited for a while to see if he’d come down—even as a kid, he’d always liked sleeping in late—but with all the noise they were making chattering and moving around looking for things to make coffee, it eventually became obvious that he wasn’t going to come down at all. Eddie couldn’t help but wonder if he shouldn’t have left him alone, after all.

“Where's Richie?” Bev asked, and Ben frowned. 

“Sleeping, hopefully,” he replied. “Found him this morning semi-conscious on the bathroom floor and burning up. Some kind of stomach bug. Said he'd been there all night puking.” 

Eddie immediately regretted forcing water on him as he had. He could have opened his suitcase pharmacy and found him something for the nausea, first, or at least a seltzer tablet to help it sit better. He'd probably only made it worse. 

“He’s sick?” Bill asked. “You’re s-sure he’s not just hungover?”

“Hangovers don’t cause fevers,” Eddie provided, shifting his gaze to Ben. “How bad was it?”

He shrugged. “I’m not a doctor,” he said. “He felt hot; he was exhausted. Barely said two words to me.”

Eddie felt the seed of worry in his gut begin to flower and bloom. “Like he was listless?” 

“Exactly.”

“Was he sweating? Did you get him to drink any water?”

Bev was biting down on a smile. “Eddie, if you’re so worried about him, why don’t you go check on him?”

“I don’t—I’m not WORRIED, per se, I just—”

“Eddie,” Bill interrupted. “Just g-go knock on his door, see if he’s up. B-b-bring him this,” he offered a bottle of water from the kitchen refrigerator, “tell him it’s from me if you want.”

Eddie’s hand hesitated in front of the cup. He didn’t want to talk to Richie, really: it always ended in relentless teasing that was usually more trouble than it was worth. He didn’t want to go into a room with a sick person. In fact, he’d much rather spend his morning finding gloves and a mask to Lysol the bathroom. 

He didn’t expect Richie to answer the door when he knocked on it. Even less than that did he expect for the answer he received to be a weak moan. 

“Richie?” he called. “You alive in there?”

“Unfortunately,” he groaned. “Whaddaya want?”

“Can…” He took a deep breath. “Can I come in?” He made another miserable sound that he took as an affirmative and Eddie pushed open the door. “Man, Ben was right. You look like shit. You’ve been throwing up since midnight?”

He shook his head. “On the phone with Mike,” he rasped, his voice (blessedly) shot from vomiting. “And at the restaurant.” 

Eddie’s eyes went wide. “THAT’S why you were gone so long,” he realized aloud, feeling stupid for not seeing that earlier. “Jesus, why didn’t you say something? Somebody could have taken you home if you weren’t feeling well.”

Richie shrugged. “Kinda had bigger fish to fry.”

Well, that was fair. “How long since you last puked?”

Richie flushed as if he were embarrassed, but that wasn’t possible because this was RICHIE, and it was then that Eddie realized that he wasn’t sweating. 

“When did you go to med school?” he deflected, and Eddie rolled his eyes. 

“Just answer the question, dumbass.” The words weren’t as harsh as they normally might be and as he said them, he reached out and put his hand to Richie’s forehead once more. “That’s way up from last night. Think you can keep aspirin down?”

“I can’t say I want to find out… Eddie, this’ll pass, so you don’t have to be here. I know you’re probably crawling out of your skin right now.”

He had to admit that yes, he was hyperaware of everything he touched and every breath he took, but he was okay. For the moment, at least, he was fine with this. 

“I’m gonna grab you some seltzer water. Should help settle your stomach. Just sit tight and I’ll be back.”

It wasn’t like Richie had much of a choice, and Eddie tried to convince himself as he prepared a wet washrag for Richie’s forehead and dropped a seltzer tablet into a cup of water that his anxiety was rooted in his being stuck in a room with a sick person and not in worry for Richie, but that was a difficult thing to keep in mind as he voluntarily pushed in the door to care for his friend.


End file.
